V.
THE SILVER CHIMES RING IN A HAPPY NEW YEAR.
One December evening Falkenstein sat in his lodgings in Vienna; the wood fire burnt brightly, and if its flames lighted up a room whose appanages were rather different to the palace his grandfather had owned in the imperial city, they at least shone on waving hair and violet eyes that were very dear to him, and helped to teach him to forget much that he had forfeited. From England he had come to Vienna, where, as he had projected, his uncle, one of the cabinet, had been able to help him to a diplomatic situation, for which his keen judgment and varied information fitted him; and in Austria his name gave him at once a brevet of the highest nobility. Of course the knowledge that he was virtually outlawed, and that he was deep in the debt of such sharps as Amadeus Levi, often galled his proud and sensitive nature; but Valérie knew how to soften and to soothe him, and, under her caressing affection or her ready vivacity, the dark hours passed away.
He was smoking his favorite briar-wood pipe, with Valérie sitting at his feet, reading him some copy just going to her publishers in England, and little Spit, not forgotten in their flight, lying on the hearth, when a deep English voice startled them, singing out, "Here you are at last! I give you my word, I've been driving over this blessed city two hours to find you!"
"Tom!" cried Falkenstein.
"Captain Bevan!" echoed Valérie, springing to her feet, while Spit began barking furiously.
Bevan shook hands with them; heartily glad to see his friend again, though, of course he grumbled more about the snow and the stupidity of the Viennese than anything else. "Very jolly rooms you've got," said he at last; "and, 'pon my life, you look better than I've seen you do a long time, Waldemar. Madame has done wonders for you."
"Madame" laughed, and glanced up at Falkenstein, who smiled half sadly.
"She has taught me how to find happiness, Tom. I wish you may get such a teacher."
"Thank you, so do I, if my time ever comes; but geniuses aux longs yeux bleus are rare in the world. But you're wondering why I'm here, ain't you?"
"I was flattering myself you were here to see us."
"Well, of course and very glad to see you, too; but I'm come in part as your governor's messenger."
Valérie saw him look up quickly, a flush on his face. "My father?"
"Yes, that rascal—(you know I always said he was good for nothing, a fool that couldn't smoke a Queen without being sick)—I mean, your brother Maximillian—was at the bottom of the Count's row with you. Last week I was dining at old Fitz's, and your father and sisters were there, and when the women were gone I asked him when he'd last heard of you; of course he looked tempestuous, and said, 'Never.' Happily, I'm not easily shut up, so I told him it was a pity, then, for if he did he'd hear you were jollier than ever, and I said your wife was—— Well, I won't say what, for fear we spoil this young lady, and make her vain of herself. The old boy turned pale, and said nothing; but two days after I got a line from him, saying he wasn't quite well; would I go down and speak to him. I found him chained with the gout, and he began to talk about you. I like that old man, Waldemar, I do, uncommonly. He said he'd been too hasty, but that it was a family failing, and that Max had brought him such—well, such confounded lies—about Valérie, that he would have shot you rather than see you give her your name; now he wants to have you back. I'd nothing to do, so I said I'd come and ask you to forgive the poor old boy, and come and see him, for he isn't well. I know you will, Falkenstein, because you never did bear malice."
"Oh yes, he will," murmured Valérie, tears in her eyes. "I separated you, Waldemar; you will let me see you reconciled?"
"My darling, yes! Poor old governor!" And Falkenstein stopped and smoked vigorously, for kindness always touched him to the heart.
Bevan looked at him and was silent. "I say," he whispered, when he was a moment alone with Valérie. "I didn't tell Waldemar, because I thought you'd break it to him less blunderingly than I should, but the old Count's breaking fast. I doubt if he'll live another week."
Bevan was right. In another week Falkenstein stood by the death-bed of his father. He had a long interview with him alone, in which the old Count detailed to him the fabricated slanders with which his brother had blackened Valérie's name. With all his old passion he disowned the son capable of such baseness, and constituted Waldemar his sole heir, save the legacies left his daughters. He died in Waldemar's arms the night they arrived in England, with his last word to him and Valérie, whom, despite Virginia's opposition, he insisted on seeing. Falkenstein's sorrow for his father was deep and unfeigned, like his character; but his guardian angel, as he used to call her, was there to console him, and, under the light of her smile, sorrow could not long pursue him.
On his brother, always his own enemy, and now the traducer of the woman he loved, Waldemar's wrath fell heavily, and would, to a certainty, have found some means of wreaking itself, but for the last wishes of his father. As it was, he took a nobler, yet a more complete revenge. The day of the funeral, when they were assembled for the reading of the will, Maximilian, unconscious of his doom, came with his gentle face, and tender melancholy air, to inherit, as he believed, Fairlie, and all the personal property.
Stunned as by a spent ball, horror-struck, disbelieving his senses, he heard his younger brother proclaimed the heir. It was a serious thing to him, moreover, for—for a man of large expenses and great ostentation—his own means were small. To secure every shilling he had schemed, and planned, and lied; and now every shilling was taken from him. Like the dog of Æsopian memory, trying to catch two pieces of meat, he had lost his own!
After the last words were read, Waldemar stood a moment irresolute; then he lifted his head, his dark eyes bright and clear, his mouth fixed and firm, a proud calm displacing his old look of passion and of care.
He went up to his brother with a generous impulse, and held out his hand.
"Maximilian, from our boyhood you never liked me, and of late you have done me a great wrong; but I am willing to believe that you did it from a mistaken motive, and by me, at least, it shall never be recalled. My father, in his wish to make amends for the one harsh act of his life to me, has made a will which I know you consider unjust. I cannot dispute his last desire that I should inherit Fairlie, but I can do what I know he would sanction—divide with you the wealth his energy collected. Take the half of the property, as if he had left it to you, and over his grave let us forget the past!"
On the last day of the year, so eventful to them both, Falkenstein and Valérie drove through the park at Fairlie. The rôle of a country gentleman would have been the last into which Waldemar, with his independent opinions and fastidious intellect, would have sunk; but he was fond of the place from early associations, and he came down to take possession. The tenantry and servants welcomed him heartily, for they had often used to wish that the wild high-spirited child, who rode his Shetland over the country at a headlong pace, and if he sometimes teased their lives out, always gave them a kind word and merry laugh, had been the heir instead of the one to whom they applied the old proverb "still and ill."
The tenantry had been dismissed, the dinner finished, even the briarwood pipe smoked out, and in the wide Elizabethan window of the library Falkenstein stood, looking on the clear bright night, and watching the Old Year out.
"You sent the deed of gift to-day to Maximilian?" said Valérie, clasping both her hands on his arm.
"Yes. He does not take it very graciously; but perhaps we can hardly expect that from a man who has been disinherited. I question if I should accept it at all."
"But you could never have wronged another as he wronged you," cried Valérie. "Oh, Waldemar! I think I never realised fully, till the day you took your generous revenge, how noble, how good, how above all others you are."
He smiled, and put his hand on her lips.
"Good, noble, silly child! those words may do for some spotless Gahlahad or Folko, not for me, who, a month ago, was in debt to some of the greatest blackguards in town, who have yielded to every temptation, given way to every weakness; not with the excuse of a boy new to life, but willfully and recklessly, knowing both the pleasures and their price—I, who but for your love and my father's, should now be a solitary exile, paying for my past follies with——"
"Be quiet," interrupted Valérie, with her passionate vivacity. "As different as was 'Mirabeau jugé par sa famille et Mirabeau jugé par le peuple,' are you judged by your enemies, and judged by those who love you. Granted you have had temptations, follies, errors; so has every man of high spirit and generous temper, and I value you far more coming out of a fiery furnace with so much of pure gold that the flames could not destroy, than if you were some ascetic Pharisee, who has never succumbed because he has never been tempted, and, born with no weaknesses, is born with no warmer virtues either!"
Falkenstein laughed, as he looked down at her.
"You little goose! Well, at least you have eloquence, Valérie, if not truth, on your side; and your sophistry is dear to me, as it springs out of your love."
"But it is not sophistry," she cried, with an energetic stamp of her foot. "If you will not listen to philosophy, concede, at least, to fact. Which is most worthy of my epithets—'noble and good'—Waldemar Falkenstein, or Maximillian? And yet Maximillian has been quiet and virtuous from his youth upwards, and always wins white balls from the ballot of society."
"Well, you shall have the privilege of your sex—the last word," smiled Waldemar, "more especially as the last word is on my side."
"Hark!" interrupted Valérie, quiet and subdued in a second, "the clock is striking twelve."
Silently, with her arms round his neck, they listened to the parting knell of the Old Year, stealing quietly away from its place among men. From the church towers through England tolled the twelve strokes, with a melancholy echo, telling a world that its dead past was laid in a sealed grave, and the stone of Never More was rolled to the door of the sepulchre. The Old Year was gone, with all its sins and errors, its golden gleams and midnight storms, its midsummer days of sunshine for some, its winter nights of starless gloom for others. Its last knell echoed; and then, from the old grey belfries in villages and towns, over the stirring cities and the sleeping hamlets, over the quiet meadows and stretching woodlands and grand old forest trees, rang the Silver Chimes of the New Year.
"It shall be a happy New Year to you, my darling, if my love can make it so," whispered Waldemar, as the musical bells clashed out in wild harmony under the winter stars.
She looked up into his eyes. "I must be happy, since it will be passed with you. Do you remember, Waldemar, the night I saw you first, my telling you New Year's-day was my birthday, and wondering where you and I should spend the next? I liked you strangely from the first, but how little I foresaw that my whole life was to hang on yours!"
"As little as I foresaw when, after heavy losses at Godolphin's, I watched the Old Year out in my chambers, a tired, ruined, hopeless, aimless man, with not one on whom I could rely for help or sympathy in my need, that I should stand here now, free, clear from debt, with all my old entanglements shaken off, my old scores wiped out, my darker errors forgotten, my worst enemy humbled, and my own future bright. Oh! Valérie! Heaven bless you for the love that followed me into exile!"
He drew her closer to him as he spoke, and as he felt the beating of the heart that was always true to him, and the soft caress of the lips that had always a smile for him, Falkenstein looked out over the wide woodland that called him master, glistening in the clear starlight, and as he listened to the Silver Chimes—joyous herald of the New-born Year—he blessed in his inmost heart the Golden Fetters of Love.